Chascomús and the Salado frontier

Chascomús, south of Buenos Aires, was the first Irish region in Argentina. According to Patrick McKenna's 1994 thesis, the first large movement of Irish into the countryside came around 1830, to the Chascomús area, Juan Manuel de Rosas's home district, and north-west along the Salado river. Creole estate owners financed immigrant shepherds on frontier land on shares, partly as a buffer against Indigenous groups. The shepherds moved with their flocks rather than settling, and by the 1840s small, mobile and overwhelmingly male Irish communities had formed there. In 1829 Rosas revived a law conscripting men who were not working the land, which pushed people, Irish included, out of the city.

The district shaped the community's church. Archbishop Murray of Dublin chose Fr Anthony Fahy as chaplain because Irish settlers around Chascomús were starting to marry locally, McKenna writes. After his arrival in 1844 Fahy placed his assistant chaplains first at Chascomús and Dolores, then at Mercedes, San Antonio de Areco and Chivilcoy. The Sisters of Mercy opened a school, Saints Peter and Paul, at Chascomús in 1865; it closed after the cholera of 1868.

As more fertile land opened north-west between the Paraná and Salado rivers, the Irish moved there, clustering round old military forts that later became towns. John James Murphy of Kilrane, Co. Wexford, who arrived in 1844, began as a ditch-digger and shepherd at Chascomús before owning two estancias. Monte and Saladillo, frontier districts on the Salado, had 241 and 150 Irish in 1869.